About Us

Longer: This blog favours a vision of nursing that values nurses and allows nurses to provide safe, competent and evidence-based care to their patients, and to practice at their full potential.

We view the health care system with a great deal of scepticism; we are especially suspicious of consultant-driven “reform”, managerial incompetence and boobery masquerading as being “change leadership”, all forms of human-resource-speak that devalues and demeans nurses, and general wastefulness.

But we am not willing to drink the Kool-Aid of nursing leaders (and managers) who think if we wish hard enough and have positive, nice thoughts, we’ll live in a happier world. That’s called magical thinking, and it’s commonly practised by children and psychiatric patients. Simple enough, eh?

Contributors:

TorontoEmerg, who is a Luddite at heart, and who also swears a lot.

JeanHill: who wears scarves inappropriate to actual weather and who also is secretly appalled by TorontoEmerg’s cursing.

Hi
I read the above blog post with interest. I’m doing some research on Canadian hospitals, wait times and ‘bed shortages’ especially in relation to patients deemed ‘ALC’. I’d like to get the perspective of people, like nurses, who are working on the front line. My email address is Patti.Newman@globalnews.com.

I consult for a medical information database that’s looking to expand readership and use. We feel this resource would be a valuable asset to your readers, if you could help us out with a text link we would be more then willing to compensate you.

Your site is great! I’m just getting started on a new nursing website blog and I was wondering if we could exchange links. I’m so new to this, I just figured out how to work on my blogroll. My site addresses various topics for colleagues, patients, caregivers and the general public. I’m trying to share, through words, my 30+ years nursing experience. My name is Stephanie Jewett, RN, MBA from Iowa and I’ll leave my site for you to visit. THANKS!http://www.nursingcomments.com/

I just have a quick question for you but couldn’t find an email so had to resort to this. I am a progressive blogger and the owner of the mahablog. Please email me back at barbaraobrien@maacenter.org when you get a chance. Thanks.

Ok….you had me at “boobery.” Seriously, though, I subscribed after I saw hits coming back from your page to mine and came over to read your blog. I would LOVE for you to come and spread your love in my facility. The Kool-Aid has been flowing for years, and at this point it seems to flow from every orifice in administrative offices…. in all of the facilities. And I have worked in several. One point that everyone seems to forget is that is is akin to being in the 4th ring of Hell when working with all females….. and before my selective Tourettes kicks in, I will sign off for now. :0) Thanks for the slap.

I loved your blog until I got to the part about nurse managers wanting everyone to drink the Kool-aid. That kind of thinking is a good part of the problem in nursing. We are all nurses, some of us work the bedside, some of us do nursing research, some of us teach and some of us manage. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a part of nursing and by segragating them as unrealist rainbow chasers you demean all nurses.

Thanks for the feedback. Two points: self-criticism as a profession is not a bad thing, and neither is holding managers’ feet to the fire. Actually I wish more managers would “chase rainbows” in terms of gold-standard, evidence-based practice, professionalism, and empowerment. I do have an issue with managers (and others) who will act in ways that are detrimental to both individual nurses and the profession as a whole, and then dress it up as the greatest thing since Florence invented the cap.

All of which is to say I am relentlessly pro-nursing. Sometimes managers (and others) aren’t, and need to be called on it.

Great blog! I came here searching for poems and found a refreshing perspective on nursing. As an MS patient, I have come across so many nurses (some wonderful and some terrible). I like the ‘provide safe, competent and evidence-based care to their patients, and to practice at their full potential’ part immensely.

Thanks for your fine blog and for following mine even as I learn how to do it right, step by painful step. As for positive thinking, it surely gets oversold as a panacea, yet it also has solid proven merit. To the extent we feel able to make things better, we also tend to put in the effort that is needed to actually make it so. To the extent that we accept things as is, we ensure no improvement is likely. Attitude influences reality in this way, not magic but certainly influential and worth some effort. I argue for positive attitude not about how the world is – we’re given a world loaded with crap that needs fixing – but about our ability to find ways to improve it and to successfully implement them. Complaining without offering solutions makes a bad situation even worse, whereas offering problems and solutions is the main reason we no longer barely survive day to day cold and naked in caves, as did our ancestors.

I couldn’t agree more TorontoEmerg. It seems like more and more decisions regarding the care I give, how I give it, when I give it , is being decided by HR people so far from the bedside they couldn’t tell an ass from an elbow. Yet I’m supposed to ‘champion the change’ as God’s gift to my practice, taking away the need for me to decide how to give care & become the literal beast of burdern with a vitals cart and a diaper.

I’m probably moving to the GTA sometime soon, and I hope there are more nurses like you out there to challenge the so-called reform that sees money taken from actual caregivers in exchange for pretty words and false promises on the backs of nurses.